Displays. I love them. Pretty much anything that lights up is cool, but things that can display numbers, letters and other symbols are just awesome and making them work, even better. One of the coolest things I remember from my childhood are seeing those red, seven segment displays. They became cool (and cheap) and showed up everywhere. Newspapers and magazines would emulate the look in articles and stories and the ads. Science Fiction movies and tv shows ate them up. They were everywhere. Then…sometime in the late eighties…they sort of went away, in favor of LCD and other display tech. Or, worse…they changed color! But, for me, its’ those RED ones.

I just had to make something with those uber cool RED seven segments. But, what? Well, why not a clock? Yeah, a clock.

// The amount of time (in milliseconds) between tests#define TEST_DELAY 2000

TM1637Display display(CLK, DIO);

void setup () {

if (! rtc.begin()) {Serial.println(“Couldn’t find RTC”);}

if (! rtc.isrunning()) {Serial.println(“RTC is NOT running!”);// following line sets the RTC to the date & time this sketch was compiledrtc.adjust(DateTime(F(__DATE__), F(__TIME__)));// This line sets the RTC with an explicit date & time, for example to set// January 21, 2014 at 3am you would call:// rtc.adjust(DateTime(2014, 1, 21, 3, 0, 0));}uint8_t data[] = { 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff };display.setBrightness(0x0f);